Empty Cradle Research Articles

Empty cradles: medical authority and disappeared children

During the creation of the state of Israel, thousands of babies and young children were removed from their Jewish immigrant families by welfare and medical authorities. New to the state of Israel, these families from the Middle East, the Balkans, and north Africa spoke little Hebrew and were often living in poverty or transit camps. Children were removed on the belief that their parents could not look after them. Their children would be taken to hospitals and nurseries and never seen again. The parents were told their children had died.

A Good Time to Be Born

A Good Time to Be Born

Nature Is Healing

Nature Is Healing

Birth Rights and Wrongs: Reply to Critics

Advances in medicine and technology promise to deliver us from the vagaries of the genetic lottery. But the pandemic hasn’t spared reproductive freedom. School closures and clinic restrictions make birth control and fertility treatment harder to get, while new regulations put abortion, surrogacy, and genetic testing out of reach for many in need. My book charts the landscape of harms like these and hundreds of other less familiar ones scattered across American jurisprudence—from lab accidents to contraceptive sabotage. I mine this cross-cutting body of law and organize it into three discrete categories. Some cases, like botched vasectomies, impose unwanted pregnancy. Others deprive people of the baby they long for—take the recent spate of IVF freezer meltdowns. Lastly are the examples involving donor mix-ups that confound parents’ hopes for a baby born free of disease or one who shares their DNA. Birth Rights and Wrongs traces a moral culture and political economy that resists meaningful regulation of the shoddy practices that leave couples with empty cradles or turn them into parents against their will. Reproductive injuries like these can upend people’s core identities and lived experiences. Yet they fall through the cracks of available contract, property, and tort protections in the United States. When reproduction goes awry, courts almost always let doctors, pharmacists, and sperm banks off the hook, rarely willing to grant that the plaintiff was harmed. Some say: Babies are blessings. Others insist: You can’t always get what you want. Or: physical intrusion? No property loss? No damages. And: It’d open the floodgates to fraud. The result is a legal system resigned to treat these transgressions as inevitable or natural, and at any rate unworthy of recognition or remedy. My book diagnoses this problem and tries to solve it, by rethinking reproductive controversies from abortion funding to gene editing. Boston University Law Review has brought together an exceptional and diverse panel of scholars to wrestle with these ideas in this special symposium issue dedicated to the book. I owe a special debt to Professors Appleton, Cahill, Dolgin, Robertson, and Ziegler for their critical engagement and searching insights. Each appraises the book from a unique and rich lens: philosophy, sociology, politics, economics, and history. I’m humbled by what good they find in the book. My reply here will focus on their challenges—sometimes by clarifying the themes I’d developed; other times by taking this occasion to revise or elaborate on them. It's true that today’s plaintiffs missed the heyday of personality torts: It’s been more than a century since courts last flexed their common-law muscles to establish new torts like slander, privacy, and defamation. But lost embryos, bungled birth control, and switched sperm samples give reason to recover that muscle memory. These mix-ups seem like “first world” problems, especially in the midst of a public health crisis that has transformed even parts of our lives we used to take for granted. Yet reliable health and child care have never mattered more than since stay-at-home orders, broken supply chains, and clinic restrictions stymied dreams for family life.

El motivo de la cuna vacía en la poesía lírica posromántica española

La muerte infantil ha sido, en Occidente, uno de los principales temas de la poesía lírica. Y uno de los motivos de este tema es el de la cuna vacía, cuyo principal recurso discursivo es la perífrasis eufemística. En el presente artículo, realizaremos en primer lugar un recorrido por la poesía de la muerte infantil desde el Siglo de Oro hasta el siglo XX. En segundo lugar, situaremos el motivo de cuna vacía en el marco de la atenuación del dolor producido por la muerte de un hijo. Este objetivo es perseguido por la cultura de la cursilería, propugnada por la burguesía de la segunda mitad del siglo XIX. También se identifican en el presente artículo las más importantes manifestaciones poéticas del motivo de la cuna vacía, que estuvo en auge en el posromanticismo. Finalizaremos con un análisis de dos conocidas poesías que expresan este motivo, “La cuna vacía”, de José Selgas, y “Dulce sueño”, de Rosalía de Castro.

Oranges and Sunshine: The Story of a Traumatic Encounter

This paper will rely on some well-known theories on trauma, memory and ethics to study how Jim Loach’s debut film Oranges and Sunshine (2010) testifies to the traumatic deportation of up to 150,000 British children to distant parts of the Empire, mainly Australia, until 1970. Oranges and Sunshine was based on Margaret Humphreys’ moving memoir, originally entitled Empty Cradles (1994) but later re-titled Oranges and Sunshine after Loach’s film. What these two texts basically claim is the need to recover historic memory through heart-breaking acts of remembrance, which can alone denounce the atrocities that were concomitant with the colonial enterprise and pave the way for disclosing and working through individual and collective traumas.

Book Review: Gift of Time: Continuing Your Pregnancy when Your Baby's Life is Expected to be Brief

Amy Kuebelbeck is an author and mother. She is a journalist who previously worked as a reporter and editor for the Associated Press. She is the author of the book Waiting with Gabriel, the story of her journey with her son Gabriel, who was diagnosed prenatally with hypoplastic left heart syndrome and lived only a short time after birth. She writes from personal experience about perinatal hospice and brings together the stories of over 120 mothers and fathers who experienced a baby with a lethal anomaly. Amy writes with Deborah L. Davis, who is a developmental psychologist and an expert in neonatal medical ethics and perinatal bereavement. Her work includes the book Empty Cradle, Broken Heart: Surviving the Death of Your Baby. What results from their collaboration is a practical, personal, readable, and encouraging book about how to deal with perinatal loss and stillbirth due to lethal anomalies. The whole concept of perinatal hospice is fleshed out and explained. Most importantly, the book encourages parents to relish the special time they will have with their child.

CULTURAL PRACTICES AND BELIEFS ON NEWBORN CARE AMONG MOTHERS IN A SELECTED HOSPITAL OF MANGALORE TALUK

Abstract: Background: A human infant from the time of birth upto 28th day of life is called a newborn. Nearly 27 million babies are born in India each year. Every year 4 million babies die in the first month of life in the world and quarter of these takes place in India. A package of essential newborn practices exist in India which has proven impact on reducing mortality. However child birth and neonatal period are culturally important times during which there is strong adhere to traditional practices. Materials and Methods: A descriptive research design was adopted for this study. Purposive sampling method was used to select 157 samples from a selected hospital. Demographic Performa and structured dichotomous questionnaire was used to collect the data from the subject. Results: The data collected from 157 samples were analyzed using descriptive statistics. (149) 95% of the mothers have followed oil massage for the baby before bath. (83) 53% of the mothers have provided home remedies for the baby. (87) 55% of the mothers were applying ashes, soot, powder, or dry cow dung, (115) 73% mothers exposed their babies to the sunlight when the baby's skin turns yellowish. (129) 82% of the mothers are applied 'Kajal' on baby's face to prevent bad eye. (92) 59% of the mothers are practicing a belief that “empty cradle should not be moved”. Interpretation and conclusion: Findings of the study revealed that there is a strong relationship between the demographic variables (type of family and religion) and cultural practices and beliefs on newborn care among mothers. Periodical health education regarding do's and don'ts of newborn care should be conducted in postnatal ward, which will definitely minimize the unhealthy traditional practices.

The Empty Cradle of Democracy: Sex, Abortion, and Nationalism in Modern Greece

The Empty Cradle of Democracy: Sex, Abortion, and Nationalism in Modern Greece

The Empty Cradle of Democracy: Sex, Abortion, and Nationalism in Modern Greece By Alexandra Halkias Duke University Press, 2005. 413 pages. $89.95 (cloth); $24.95 (paper)

The Empty Cradle of Democracy: Sex, Abortion, and Nationalism in Modern Greece By Alexandra Halkias Duke University Press, 2005. 413 pages. $89.95 (cloth); $24.95 (paper)

The Empty Cradle of Democracy: Sex, Abortion and Nation in Modern Greece. Reviewed by Peter S. Allen

The Empty Cradle of Democracy: Sex, Abortion and Nation in Modern Greece. Reviewed by Peter S. Allen

Conceiving the Nation: The "Politics of the Womb" in Kenya, the United States, Greece, and Ireland

Alexandra Halkias. The Empty Cradle of Democracy: Sex, Abortion, and Nationalism in Modern Greece. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004. xv + 413 pp. ill. ISBN 0-8223-3311-2 (cl); 0-8223-3323-6 (pb). Jimmy Elaine Wilkinson Meyer. Any Friend of the Movement: Networking for Birth Control, 1920–1940. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2004. xxii + 296 pp. ISBN 0-8142-0954-8 (cl). Jennifer E. Spreng. Abortion and Divorce Law in Ireland. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2004. ix + 259 pp. ISBN 0-7864-1675-0 (pb). Lynn M. Thomas. Politics of the Womb: Women, Reproduction, and the State in Kenya. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003. xiii + 300 pp.; maps. ISBN 0-520-22450-7 (cl); 0-520-23540-1 (pb). Feminist scholars and activists alike have long been attentive to the shape and effects of the modern nation-state's interests in women's reproductive behavior. Across disciplines and in many different struggles they have demonstrated that nationalist ideologies as well as material processes of state formation depend fundamentally on elites' ability to control which citizens have how many babies and whether they have them or will be allowed to prevent themselves from having them. These four books offer quite different but ultimately complementary perspectives on what Lynn Thomas so aptly calls the "politics of the womb." Together they enrich our cross-national understanding of the gendered nature of the nation-state as well as of women's often contradictory responses to state formation and legitimation. Lynn Thomas gives us a fascinating and rich analysis of what she calls the "entanglement" of precolonial gender, sexual, and reproductive relations with colonial attempts to "reform" family law in the Meru region of twentieth-century British Kenya. Despite the colonial state's intended strategy of ruling Africans indirectly by reforming and shoring up customary systems of local rule in the rural areas not settled by white farmers, its agents intervened regularly in those systems when colonial interests changed. In [End Page 151] turn, new definitions of Meru tradition reconstructed women's practices, although often not in the ways state actors, their African collaborators, or newly marginalized traditional elites intended. Unrestricted access to a plentiful supply of cheap black labor was the colonizers' top priority, particularly in settler colonies such as Kenya. Paradoxically, however, colonization indirectly decreased Meru birth rates; the destruction of precolonial economic structures forced newly impoverished families to delay marriages—and the clitoral excision ceremonies that made Meru girls marriageable—until young men could pay bride wealth. Delayed marriage meant more premarital sex and, predictably, more out-of-wedlock pregnancies. Because Meru men would not pay to marry unexcised mothers, young women used abortion and infanticide to protect their chances of marriage. Rather than address the economic crisis underlying the declining numbers of Meru laborers, British officials used their interpretations of customary law to encourage the Meru to legitimate rather than terminate out-of-wedlock pregnancies. In their attempts to reduce bridewealth costs, sever the connection between female genital excision and marriage, and punish fathers who refused to marry the women they impregnated, colonial officials and their African collaborators created a local government in Meru. British transformations-cum-codifications of customary law and the actual court cases to which they gave rise—all done in the struggle to control African wombs—tied rural families, economies, and ideologies to the larger project of state formation in Kenya. Thomas's oral histories of Meru women and men born before Kenyan independence combined with her close reading of paternity cases brought to the tribal courts effectively demonstrate that African women both resisted and embraced interventions in marital, sexual, and reproductive relations. Meru girls fought off attempts by local agents of the state and male elders alike to stop excision; as clitoral surgeries went underground, they became more dangerous but neither less frequent nor...

The Empty Cradle of Democracy: Sex, Abortion, and Nationalism in Modern Greece

The Empty Cradle of Democracy: Sex, Abortion, and Nationalism in Modern Greece

The Empty Cradle of Democracy: Sex, Abortion, and Nationalism in Modern Greece (review)

Reviewed by: The Empty Cradle of Democracy: Sex, Abortion, and Nationalism in Modern Greece Peter Loizos The Empty Cradle of Democracy: Sex, Abortion, and Nationalism in Modern Greece. By Alexandra Halkias. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2004. Pp. 413. $89.95 (cloth); $24.95 (paper). This study is difficult to summarize fair-mindedly because it is a relatively long monograph with arguments and data that connect diverse social contexts. It is scholarly, erudite, wide-ranging, provocative, and somewhat prolix. It reminds me at times of a bramble bush—it has a similar vitality but at a similar cost to one's encounter with it. The dominant theoretical influences are Foucault, Gramsci, and Judith Butler. Extracts from poems are sprinkled through the text, some more lucid than others. Nothing is said once only—the author restates her theoretical and descriptive goals [End Page 339] repeatedly. But there are many fine insights and original ideas, and the interviews with women are often moving and informative. It is in several senses a Big Book, but is it better for being bigger? The study comprises the following main elements: a presentation and analysis of ninety in-depth interviews with Athenian women who had had two or more abortions. Some were married mothers, some were unmarried, and some were not mothers. The study also reported on a small number of more than four hundred observations of gynecological examinations in fertility and state abortion clinics. The third data set includes articles from national newspapers on what is known in Greek as to demografiko, "the demographic problem," and refers to the comparatively low recent birth rates and high abortion rates among Greek women and to the imputed political implications of these. This is normally discussed as an ethnonational problem, a problem of state and society, since Greece's relationship with one neighbor, Turkey, has meant there have been risks of war on at least five occasions since 1955. Turkey, at eighty million, continues to grow demographically, while Greeks at eleven million are no longer replacing themselves. Greeks as a nation have been somewhat defensive about Turkey. But to get to the major data sets: the author describes briefly Greece as a state that emerged from a series of divisive political conflicts in the twentieth century and that is now, since its entry into the European Union in 1981, securely democratic and oriented toward modernity, which includes an articulate feminist movement and public debates about how far Orthodox Christianity should be the moral framework for individuals and families. Many educated Greeks are only formally Orthodox Christians and would like to feel that they "think for themselves" on issues of sexuality and procreation. The book raises the question of how far such would-be secular Greeks can think outside the framework of Orthodoxy as culture. Clearly, the specific sexual and procreative patterns of any society are of comparative interest, and demographers have long known that all kinds of demographic issues have political and gender resonances. Halkias is a sociologist, not a demographer. Where demographers typically tackle a limited set of issues with a view to precision and causal explanation and produce linear arguments, Halkias has different ambitions. She wants us to make a set of personal and political connections where we might not have previously been aware of links. She wants to be able to say in what senses women's and men's sexuality and procreative behaviors are deeply affected by the political discourse of the nation-state. Such questions cannot easily be answered with the same precision with which in theory a question about a change in the number of children per married woman can be answered. And at several points Halkias herself admits that what her informants have said to her does not necessarily reflect the preoccupations of her analysis. That does not, of course, invalidate her arguments—it simply adds an onion skin of interpretation for the reader. [End Page 340] Consider this statement: "There are few explicit references to Greece and to God in the excerpts presented above. My argument, however, is that Greece, as a set of stories about what it means to be a human in the world that is moreover...

The empty cradle: how falling birthrates threaten world prosperity and what to do about it

A controversial argument that reduced fertility and global aging threaten world prosperity, jeopardize national economies, and will change our way of life for decades to come. Overpopulation has long been a global concern. But between modern medicine and reduced fertility, world population may in fact be shrinking--and is almost certain to do so by the time today's children retire. The troubling implications for our economy and culture include: The possibility of a fundamentalist revival due to the decline of secular fertility The threat to the free market as the supply of workers and consumers declines The eventual collapse of the American health care system as inordinate expenses are incurred by an aging populationPhillip Longman's uncompromisingly sensible solutions fly in the face of traditional ideas. State intervention is necessary, he argues, to combat the effects of an aging population. We must provide incentives for young families, and we cannot close our eyes and hope for the best as an entire generation approaches retirement age. The Empty Cradle changes the terms of one of the most important environmental, economic, and social debates of our day.

BOOK REVIEWS

John M. BarryThe Great Influenza: The Epic Story of the Deadliest Plague in HistoryJacqueline Scott, Judith Treas, and Martin Richards (eds.) The Blackwell Companion to the Sociology of FamiliesBrígida García, Richard Anker, and Antonella Pinnelli (eds.) Women in the Labour Market in Changing Economies: Demographic IssuesSamuel P. HuntingtonWho Are We? The Challenges to America's National IdentityHerbert S. KleinA Population History of the United StatesJean Elisabeth PedersenLegislating the French Family: Feminism, Theater, and Republican Politics, 1870–1920Peter SingerOne World: The Ethics of GlobalizationJagdish BhagwatiIn Defense of GlobalizationVanessa L. FongOnly Hope: Coming of Age Under China's One‐Child PolicyArianne M. Gaetano and Tamara Jacka (eds.) On the Move: Women in Rural‐to‐Urban Migration in Contemporary ChinaPeter S. HellerWho Will Pay? Coping with Aging Societies, Climate Change, and Other Long‐Term Fiscal ChallengesPhillip LongmanThe Empty Cradle: How Falling Birthrates Threaten World Prosperity and What to Do About ItWilliam PetersenFrom Persons to People: Further Studies in the Politics of PopulationLeo Suryadinata, Evi Nurvidya Arifin, and Aris AnantaIndonesia's Population: Ethnicity and Religion in a Changing Political LandscapeUnited Nations Human Settlements ProgrammeThe Challenge of Slums: Global Report on Human Settlements

The Empty Cradle: How Falling Birthrates Threaten World Prosperity and What to Do about It

The Empty Cradle: How Falling Birthrates Threaten World Prosperity and What to Do about It

"Empty Cradles" and the Quiet Revolution: Demographic Discourse and Cultural Struggles of Gender, Race, and Class in Italy

Cultural AnthropologyVolume 16, Issue 4 p. 576-611 "Empty Cradles" and the Quiet Revolution: Demographic Discourse and Cultural Struggles of Gender, Race, and Class in Italy Elizabeth L. Krause, Elizabeth L. Krause University of Massachusetts, AmherstSearch for more papers by this author Elizabeth L. Krause, Elizabeth L. Krause University of Massachusetts, AmherstSearch for more papers by this author First published: 07 January 2008 https://doi.org/10.1525/can.2001.16.4.576Citations: 26AboutPDF ToolsExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Share a linkShare onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditWechat Citing Literature Volume16, Issue4November 2001Pages 576-611 RelatedInformation

Book Reviews: The Empty Cradle: From Colonial Times to the Present

Book Reviews: The Empty Cradle: From Colonial Times to the Present

The Empty Cradle: Infertility in America from Colonial Times to the Present (review)

The Empty Cradle: Infertility in America from Colonial Times to the Present (review)